Cheese is made within block-shaped containers that are also used to ship or otherwise transport the cheese for further processing. Some of the containers are made of stainless steel with permanently joined sides, and others are made with plywood sides that are temporarily held together between metal corners by banding. These containers have approximately 80 gallons (i.e., 304 liters) of capacity for making blocks of cheese weighing nearly 700 pounds (or about 315 kilograms).
The sides of the containers are assembled together to constitute a so-called "cheese hoop", which is used independently of a base and cover of the containers during the cheese-making process. The cheese is pressed from both the ends of the hoop to remove whey from the coagulated part of the cheese. The compressed cheese exerts large outward pressures against the cheese hoops, and the sides and joints between the sides of the cheese hoops must be especially strong to resist these pressures.
Finished cheese is extruded in large blocks from the stainless steel containers for further processing, whereas the sides of the plywood containers can be taken apart to remove the blocks of cheese. Once removed from the containers, the blocks of cheese are further processed by forcing the blocks through a matrix of wire cutters for cutting the blocks into a number of smaller chunks. Any departure of the blocks from squareness and flatness, such as bowing, produces waste that is trimmed from the exterior of the blocks and discarded.
Accordingly, the cheese containers must be made to exacting tolerances and be especially rigid. In fact, the containers are generally required to hold dimensions of the finished cheese blocks to within 3/16.sup.ths of an inch (or approximately 5 millimeters). However, the stainless steel containers tend to become dented with repeated use and produce increasing amounts of scrap. The dents also make extruding the blocks of cheese from the stainless steel containers more difficult. The plywood containers are much cheaper than the stainless steel containers and resist denting; but the plywood poses sanitation problems, and the containers are difficult to assemble. The plywood is waxed for sanitary reasons and must be refurbished before the container can be used again to make cheese.